G'day Woodsy,
Further to your summer post on the Snap-A-Roos Harbour fleet, attached are a couple of pics:
My collection of Snap-A-Roos boxes; and
My Snap-A-Roos Explorers of Space set.
Unfortunately all my boxes are empty – picked them up on Ebay from someone who had some sets, split them up and was selling all the boxes, kits and instruction sheets off separately as individual items. I was happy to get the boxes as they display best. I wasn't going to bid on all the kits and instruction sheets – too fiddly and too expensive!!! Anyway I have plenty of other kits floating around – I'll send some pics of them another day…
The history of these is that Aurora bought the kits from Melbourne-based Rosenhain & Lipman (R&L) and re-packaged them for sales into the US and elsewhere.
According to my copy of the book "Aurora Model Kits":
"In 1975 Aurora sold a nifty set of tiny snap-together models imported from Australia, the Snap-A-Roos. These had been created as cereal premiums by the Australian firm Rosenhain and Lipmann. Aurora packaged them four to a box with the hope that kids would buy several of the low priced sets… The Snap-A-Roos were sold in stores as toys and only attracted modest attention."
From the other side of the transaction, my copy of the book "Breakfast Barons – Cereal Critters and the Rosenhain and Lipmann Legacy" looks at the same deal from R&L's perspective:
"A range of [R&L] model kits was sold to the US firm Aurora who marketed them successfully as construction model kits. These kits were sold by Aurora under the name Snap-A-Roos and consisted of twelve sets…The brand was very successful for Aurora."
Interesting that the Aurora book says they "only attracted modest attention" whereas the R&L book says "the brand was very successful…" – I expect the truth was somewhere in between. No doubt that parochialism may have coloured some of those comments…
R&L provided 46 different models to Aurora, and they were arranged into 12 different theme-based sets, each containing 3 or 4 kits, so there's a bit of variety out there if you can find them…
Cheers,
Tony
Oz
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